


A Gift

by lizzledpink



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Insanity, Multi, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 20:12:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/653978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzledpink/pseuds/lizzledpink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claudia Donovan's broken the rules of nature before. She can do it again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Gift

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in an alternate season 4, for reasons that will become clear (if I've done my writing right). Beware of time-skippiness.
> 
> This is rather rough, and not quite as perfectly wrapped with a bow as I'd like, but I think I kind of like it that way. Let me know if there's any errors or anything, please.

“Bullshit,” Claudia calls; Myka looks at her in irritation and worry like Claudia’s a child in need of scolding for her language. Fuck her. Not only is Claudia an adult, but she’s said shit and asshole and all kinds of things in front of Myka before without this kind of attention.

Myka’s concerns are no longer something she’s taking into account.

…

Claudia was young, too young, when she put the first picture up on her wall. It had taken her a while to choose it, because putting up a picture of her brother felt like something obvious, like shouting to the world that she believed in an afterlife and that it invaded her head at night, plagued her with its intangibility. So in choosing the first picture to go up, she changed her tactics.

She was going to go sane, or die being sane, she decided. She could get treatment and keep looking at the same time, there was nothing precluding her from it. They’d rated her at a low-risk for any kind of violent action or self-harm, which made this place more like a retreat than a prison, in some ways.

Still, they didn’t allow her scissors, not at first. Claudia ripped the page out of the textbook without hesitation and stuck it up with a pushpin, smiling grimly.

Rheticus’ compass was her private declaration of war.

…

Steve is easy. He’s grounded, like he knows himself inside-backwards. She thinks later it has something to do with the whole gay thing – when something strikes yourself like that, the revelation that you’re so fundamentally different from the world’s expectations, you have to stand your ground.

She whispers it, curling her fingers around his wrist. “Did Livie know?” she asks him. “I hope she knew. She deserved that, but more importantly, I think you did. ”

He gazes at her without reply, but she thinks she knows his answer anyway.

Strangely, grounded as he is, she associates him with more with the Aristotelian element of Air, or Wind, or whatever. Steve always seemed like he floated above it all – above judgment, above the obstacles life threw at him, even the strange ones like a bewitched Les Paul and a girl who in the right light looks just like his dead sister. He rolls with the punches and flies with the breeze, and she wants him to teach her the same.

…

Oddly, her first thought is that she could find Todd. She has that power now. But she doesn’t.

…

“Bullshit?” Pete yelps. “You’re just going to dismiss the laws of physics and call them bullshit?”

“I just did,” Claudia replies, lofty. She twirls the streak of color in her hair between her fingers and smiles without mirth. “Come on, Pete, you know I’ve done it before.”

The way he looks at her is almost fatherly in its worry. It makes her want to gag. Myka and Pete aren’t her parents; the closest thing she’s got to that is Artie, and anyway Artie’s being a prickly asshole even more than usual lately. It’s funny, considering he’s the one who got out of this all scot free.

“Claudia, I’m worried about you,” Myka says, sincere, wide-eyed.

Claudia could strangle her.

…

“I don’t want to have sex with you or kiss you or any of that. I just want you in my life and I don’t ever want you to leave it. You can go on your merry gay way and find somebody else more dude-ish for that, but you’re my friend. I won’t let you go.”

She closes her eyes, because she doesn’t need to look at Steve to know he’s smiling.

“Did Livie know?” she asks him. He gazes at her without reply, but he knows, she knows he knows. He always knows.

…

The first orderly to discover her wall was startled, and Claudia snickered and resisted the urge to quote Monty Python.

“I know I’m crazy,” she said to her psychiatrist. She shrugs. “Publicly, I don’t endorse it. Publicly, I ignore it and don’t let it take a grip on my mind. But in private, it helps me to indulge. If I can tell the crazy I’m working on it, maybe the crazy will leave me alone less when I’m public.”

Her psychiatrist wasn’t sure she should be entertaining her notions at all, but appreciated that she could tell the difference between her delusions and reality.

The fight went out of her, and Claudia hadn’t even known she was fighting. “I’m glad too. I just… I want it to stop.”

Why?

…

Claudia ignores the knowledge for 4 months, 2 weeks and 3 days after she obtains it, but she’s driving to Louisiana to see if Mardi Gras is really all that when suddenly she finds herself taking the wrong exit and ending up in a suburb of Austin, Texas.

Humming “Don’t Stop Believing” she pulls up to a small auto repair shop, parks, and shuts off the car. She sits in silence for three hours with only Tetris and some side-work implementing a new feature on her phone to distract her.

When she looks up, it’s sunset, and a young man with dark hair and a kind face and round glasses that look much worse on him than more rectangular ones steps out of the shop and goes to his car.

She tugs a black lock of hair.

…

“Did Livie know?” she asks him. He gazes at her without reply, but he knows, she knows he knows. He always knows.

The dead always know.

She closes his eyes, ready, at last, for her plans for tomorrow.

…

Pulling Joshua out of nowhere felt like retribution. Like victory.

She gave, and she fought, and finally she wrestled the world into submission. It was about time the universe gave her what she was owed. 

Claudia knew she could win.

…

A young man with dark hair and a face she wants to kiss and round glasses that look just as damn good as his old ones steps out of the shop and goes to his car.

Then, he looks her way. Fuck, she thinks, and she drops the lock of hair in an instant. She starts the car and drives, and she doesn’t stop looking in the rear-view mirror until she’s officially lost in Austin.

She finds a bar and pulls over. It’s on her second drink that she looks down at her ring, and wonders what the hell she’s afraid of.

Claudia remembers a time when it wasn’t a battle just to stay on her feet, when she could turn around with an impish smile and her family would smile back. She had family, once. People cared, once.

She admits to herself, finally, that they still care about her. It’s Claudia who’s been struggling to do that.

She needs another drink.

…

“Claudia, I’m worried about you,” Myka says. Claudia could strangle her.

And maybe she would, but her anger burns cold, not hot, and Claudia just smiles back. “If you won’t let me do this, I’ll just have to do it myself.”

…

Claudia looks down at her ring, and wonders just what the hell she’s afraid of.

_Be brave._

…

“I can _save_ him,” Claudia screams. “Don’t you get it? I can get him back. I can save Steve’s life and nobody will _let_ me.”

“You can’t, Claudia.” Pete’s never sounded so serious in her entire life. “I know you can’t.”

She remembers Joshua slipping back into her arms, and Steve slipping out of them.

“Bullshit.”

…

Claudia ignores the information for 4 months, 2 weeks and 3 days. She thinks she acts on it right after that, but she’s wrong. It takes two days of her getting drunk and one guy grinding on her in a club to fix it. She realizes she wants to sleep with him, but then, quite suddenly, realizes she doesn’t.

_Claudia… Be brave._

…

They meet in a white space. Steve is turned away from her.

Claudia shouts his name.

He doesn’t turn around.

But then he does.

…

Claudia runs through the halls of the Warehouse, sweeping towards a very specific aisle. She calculates, in the part of her mind that isn’t blind with panic and blocking every emotion, every seize of her breath and every roll of her stomach that Pete and Myka will be waking soon from their Tesla-sleep.

She comes upon a specific item. A ring worn by somebody. Nobody really knew who.

All they knew was it was somebody who, very clearly, wanted to disappear – nobody could ever, ever recognize the wearer.

Claudia grabs it and begins one last dash for the exit.

…

Steve blinks his eyes open, breathing roughly, staring at Claudia.

Claudia smiles, blinking tears back, even as her lungs seize up again and again. She can’t breathe, well she can, but it’s getting worth, but it’s worth it.

“Claudia, you shouldn’t have done this,” he says. “You’re going to die.”

“I don’t have a choice,” she chokes out. Tears are streaming down her face. Her chest is locked up and her vision is starting to fog up.

“You’re right,” Steve replies. “You don’t have a choice. Claudia, be brave. And don’t hate me for this, but – the hardest thing in this world is…” He wipes a tear from her cheek, almost smiling, and leaves the sentence hanging. He knows she’ll finish it.

He picks up the metronome, and when he throws it against the wall, she doesn’t have the air in her lungs to scream.

She comes to.

There are shards of a metronome on the floor, and Steve is staring at her, pale with death, as she’s seen him so many times before.

She wonders if Livie knew, irrationally.

Then, she needs to leave. Before this all crashes down on her for real.

…

Why? The psychiatrist asks.

“Honestly… It’s not about having hallucinations. I don’t care if I’m crazy or something.” Claudia swallows. “If Joshua’s dead, I just want him to stop talking to me when I know he’ll never really be alive. I want the not knowing to end. And if I’m crazy, it’s not the hallucinations. It’s that the hallucinations… They’re making me want to believe. I want to hope. I can’t mourn and still have hope.”

…

Claudia felt like she should have been scarred for life, but she was laughing too hard.

For a kiss like that? Bringing out the real mistletoe was so, _so_ worth it.

That Christmas, everything felt right. Artie met her eyes, and she smiled at him. It probably said something, or even a lot of things, that he smiled back.

Months later, Jane Lattimer told her the Regents had denied her request. But Steve wouldn’t get to have Christmas, she thought.

Her rage starts then, but it stays close to her bones, and she doesn’t let it surface. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again she looks Jane in the eye and says she understands.

Jane believes her.

…

Artie meets her eyes, and she’s frozen to the spot. She has a ring clutched in one hand and a small tablet she used to hack into Warehouse in the first place in the other. Artie can let her leave with neither.

“Get out of the way,” she says, her voice rough.

“Claudia, turn yourself in,” he demands angrily. “I can’t let you leave with an artifact.”

“I can do anything I want,” she fires back.

Artie snorts. “Can you?”

_The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Claudia… Be brave. Live. For me._

(She can’t.)

Claudia pushes past Artie, but he’s like her father and she turns to look at him, expecting him to follow.

…

She checks into a hotel room under the name “Dawn Jinks” and spends the night not crying. In the morning she purchases a black wig and black clothes and hates Steve because he’s making her mourn now.

Joshua had made her sane. Steve had made her crazy. So fuck him.

Artie didn’t stop her. She doesn’t understand why.

…

Four months, two weeks and three days go by in a blur of life in a Prius on the run, even though she knows she doesn’t have to run because she’s not being followed.

She grieves. She hates herself.

She remembers nights where she went to Steve’s body and talked to him, when nobody was around to hear. She remembers the last night she did it – she remembers Jane Lattimer’s voice, apologetic but so sympathetic it made her start to boil. She remembers going to see Steve that night, and the next morning, looking up artifacts, finding a ring, finding a second ring that went with it and did the same thing.

Before they took him away, she made her choice.

The universe had bent for her before.

(She can’t live, and she doesn’t understand _why_ she can’t break the rules.)

She’s starting to feel like she’s sane again, like the world is normal and magic doesn’t exist, and she’s starting to think the crazy was better. Steve was in the crazy, at least.

But she knows she didn’t make it up. The Warehouse is real, because the ring hides her, but more because there’s an address she has memorized, a place in Austin, Texas, that had to be right. She’s had it memorized since she looked it up that day, as she ran, and then ignored it.

…

On her second drink, Claudia looks at her ring, and wonders what the hell she’s afraid of.

Two days later, after grinding against a guy she would have had sex with, she takes it off, and the black wig too. She tucks them into her purse and drives out to the suburbs of Austin until she ends up at an auto repair shop. She parks nearby, and walks in.

“Hey,” she says to the bewildered guy at the desk. “I just rolled into town, and I’m looking for this cute guy I definitely don’t know and I thought he might be here. I’m – I’m Claudia Donovan, and I was wondering if he wanted to watch a _Buffy: the Vampire Slayer_ season 5 marathon with me tomorrow.”

The guy at the desk shrugs, and takes his annoying round glasses off, and leans over the counter with a smile.

“Hi, Claudia. I’m Todd.”

…

Steve smiled whenever “Don’t Stop Believing” came on the radio, which was weird, because he wasn’t much of a music guy, actually.

“So what’s the deal with that?” Claudia asked him on their way to some mission with haunted lipstick.

“Livie’s favorite song,” he replied, smiling. “What’s yours?”

“Hotel California. The guitar gets me every time. But, seriously? I _hate_ Don’t Stop Believing. Your sister may have been great but she had shitty musical taste.”

Steve accused her of betrayal and treason, or something like that, and she stuck out her tongue, and wondered what else Steve knew about Olivia, and what his sister knew about him. Claudia wished Olivia could have known _everything_. She wished she could have known Olivia, too.

…

Artie is her father, and Joshua is her brother, but Steve was something closer than family. They were never romantic, never sexual, but to Claudia, their relationship was just as necessary in her life. Until it became more than necessary. Until it was lost, and she was lost with it.

She dropped the ring in the fountain, and felt the last of, of _something_ go. Claudia told herself she couldn’t do everything. But she could maybe start to forgive herself. She could do that.

Claudia promises herself she’ll go back to South Dakota someday as she meets Todd’s lips, leaning over the counter.

Artie deserves that much.

…

“Bullshit,” Claudia says, irritated with Myka’s irritation.

Steve was dead, but she could fix it. Why didn’t they understand? She remembers tacking Rheticus’ compass to the wall, her declaration of war. Even if it meant insanity, she would chase the people she loved and she would never, ever stop so long as there remained hope.

She had to hope. If she didn’t, grief would crush her.

Claudia fires the Tesla once, twice. When Pete falls, she hesitates before she walks past him and picks up the metronome.

Maybe someday she’ll be able to say she’s sorry.

…

“…is to live in it. Be brave. Live,” Buffy says to Dawn, “for me.” Claudia starts crying, and watches (as she has before, punching Jinksy in the arm and laughing at Michelle Trachtenberg’s acting a little) as Buffy throws herself off a tower, into a portal, and dies to save her sister’s life.

Claudia starts sobbing, and Todd, bless him, he holds her close and kisses the top of her hair.


End file.
